A technique of using cells isolated from a tissue for tests and inspections is essential in biotechnology-related fields. This technique is widely applied to diagnosis of disease and pathology, search for new drugs and determination of drug efficacy, animal inspection, plant inspection, an environmental pollutant test, and so on. Thus, cells and the like used in the biotechnology field have been greatly diversified.
Isolated cells are sometimes used immediately for tests, but in many cases, the cells are cultured in a culture dish or a test tube. Various inspections are carried out using the cultured cells. Cell lines in culture for use in cell culture tests are required to show drug susceptibility and toxic reaction that are similar to those obtained in a test performed in a living body, that is, a so-called in vivo test. In short, it is necessary to form a network of cells regularly arranged on the surface of a cell culture chamber. Furthermore, the cell lines in culture for use in cell culture tests are extremely expensive, so an improvement in survival rate and proliferation rate of cells is desired.
The cell culture tests measure the effect of a drug or the like to be evaluated, by changing its amount, concentration, and the like under the same conditions. For this reason, it is necessary that the cell culture chambers be identical in material, shape, and the like. As the cell culture chambers, a petri dish made of plastic, a petri dish made of glass, a glass plate fixed into a chamber, a well plate, and the like are generally used. Examples of the well plate include 6-well, 12-well, 48-well, and 96-well plates or petri dishes. In general, those plates have substantially the same overall size. As the number of wells increases, the size of a single well becomes smaller. A single well corresponds to a single culture dish. With the recent trend toward miniaturization, a 384-well plate having a number of culture dishes with a small diameter has also come to be used.
However, use of the conventional cell culture chamber for culturing tissue cells causes the cells to be thinned into a form with no orientation. Further, the cells are randomly arranged on the surface of the cell culture chamber, so the networks of cells cross each other in a complicated manner. Thus, there is a problem in that it is impossible to reproduce a cell function in vivo. Possible reasons for this are as follows. That is, although the wells have a small diameter, culture on a cell culture chamber is substantially the same as culture on a flat plate because the size of cells is several micrometers to several tens of micrometers. Furthermore, the cells cannot be regularly arranged because the cells are moved by a culture solution when the cells are arranged using a pipette or the like.
To solve the above-mentioned problems, a method is disclosed in which polylysine or the like, which is a cell adhesion-inducing substance, is coated on the surface on which cells are cultured according to a desired pattern (see Patent Document 1).    [Patent Document 1] Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-8173